When he died on May 12 at age 82, Robert Rauschenberg was described as many things: a beneficent champion of artists and charities; a productive, cunning artist who wasn't afraid to take on just about everything, including paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs; and an unpretentious visionary, who considered life's enigmas by using the everyday stuff we use while going about our daily lives, things like toothpaste and pillows.

The source of these qualities and accomplishments has been the artist's unceasing curiosity, an imaginative restlessness regarding art and life that was never directly about mining objects for metaphors or creating polished objects. For Rauschenberg, art and life were about the pilgrimage of creativity. And he maintained that vigorous enchantment to the end, especially in his final works, among them a group of prints called "The Lotus Series."

Printed earlier this year by Rauschenberg's longtime print collaborator, Bill Goldston of Universal Limited Art Editions, and now on view at the Blue Sky Gallery, they are based on a series of photographs of China the artist took roughly 20 years ago. They restate, in case we could ever forget, the Rauschenberg ethos and his singularity: He was art's inquisitive process seeker.

The 12 prints in the Blue Sky show are, in many ways, vintage Rauschenberg. The photography-based collage prints are fuzzy and not dramatic at all, but the way he joins them makes all the difference. In one, Rauschenberg pairs soccer fields seen from a distance with worn, crumbling vases stacked on top of one another. In another, a storefront with hanging dresses -- eerie as still wind chimes -- segues to the back of a van and a stone relief of a bird. Equally peculiar and arresting are images of a lone cyclist, scores of parked bikes lined up next to each other, a stone sculpture of what looks like a horse and the image of a lotus flower.

Almost always in these prints, where the dominant dark palette frequently bursts with garnishes of red, blue and green, there is the image of this solitary lotus. Sometimes, it is at the top of the picture frame, sometimes at the bottom, but most of the time, it is a lurking presence.

Given that Rauschenberg made the proofs earlier this year after he'd experienced some problems, we might be enticed to interpret "The Lotus Series" as an acknowledgement of death. The lotus, rooted in watery, dreamy symbolism and flights of transformation, could have held such associations for the artist.

But that seems too pointed, too clunky, for someone as intellectually liberated as Rauschenberg, whose famous combine paintings conjured loose associations rather than specific "meanings."

But Rauschenberg's work was always open-ended, inviting various interpretations. As was often noted, the artist was more attentive to the making of a painting or print and less interested in the results. For Rauschenberg, the art was the process, which is why he has been maligned at times as an overrated conceptualist who eschewed any kind of prescription or system for art. In this view, he was a bad Dadaist, kind of like Picabia.

One famous story about Rauschenberg, for example, involves the artist offering simple, easy instructions to his assistants before they were about to scour the streets of Manhattan, scrounging for materials for Rauschenberg's next project: Bring back only the stuff, he said, that you can find or buy within a block of the studio.

Maybe that's why Rauschenberg was so prolific -- the potential for art was everywhere, imagination lurked in the soccer fields and dirty street corners of China. It wasn't conjured through some heroic, divine inspiration that yielded forceful, heroic pieces of art. Rather, art is a pieced-together combination of fragments that alternate between the lyric and the ho-hum, the right and the awkward fit.

If that sounds a bit like the shape and drama of an average, ordinary day-in-the-life, then maybe that's the point. Maybe that's why it takes an investment of time to absorb and trace out the associations in this scattered blur of images. Maybe that's why those who don't take that time underestimate their beautiful complexity. They've gotten lost because they don't recognize the nature of the voyage.

It's certainly why Rauschenberg, as a rule, took photographs of the unextraordinary, the normal things we see walking down the sidewalk. That's what happened in China, too. Rauschenberg had forgotten about the photographs until Goldston asked him if he wanted to show at a Beijing art gallery. It was at that time, Christopher Rauschenberg says, that Goldston also reminded the artist about those photographs he took during two visits to China during the '80s.

"My dad didn't like to waste anything," says Christopher Rauschenberg. "He had all of these leftovers, and he wanted to cook something up with them."

The finished meal was just about done when Rauschenberg died. All of the "Lotus" proofs had been approved by him; only the printing remained, which Goldston then completed.

That's an apt conclusion for this pilgrimage, these prints made by an eternally shifting soul fascinated by the transmission of objects and materials over time, over the layers of memory that we accumulate in our lives. It was well worth the wait.

Farewell, Robert Rauschenberg.

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